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Thursday, 8 January 2015

Month names

I've just noticed; the twelve months names start with letters in the range a to o. Nothing in the later 40% of the alphabet. That seems unfair to me; discrimination against the later letters. So I started thinking; maybe we could rename December to Xmasmonth, or something like that. But then I thought, no, there's a bigger problem. The months aren't in alphabetical order.

The month names are pretty weird. "July" is named after Julius Caesar, "September" is named as the seventh month. We could rationalise this.

The first month should start with an A, the second with a B, and so on. But then we get right back to the discrimination issue, so let's make that A, C and so on.

But there's 26 letters in the alphabet, and only 12 months. So let me close this with an interesting problem.

3 comments:

An extra month is the one to go for. It could be called Solluary to ease the discrimination issue (btw - you overlooked September when stating that current month names begin with letters in a to o range). To be more radical, there is a lack of fairness in month lengths too - I would standardise the 13 month lengths as each having 28 days. Of course, 28 x 13 is only 364 days, but we solve this by having New Years Day as a holiday which need not appear on the calendar at all, so there is a gap of 1 day between the last day in December and the first in January. The same problem occurs in leap years, but can have the same solution. A new holiday of Leap Year Day occurring between the last day in Solluary and the first day in the following month - also not appearing on calendars. On the subject of calendars, with the new system, it would not be necessary to buy a new one each year - the same calendar would be valid for every year. What do you think / any drawbacks ?